Walking benefits cancer patients

Breast cancer patients who walk briskly for three to five hours per week or perform equivalent amounts of other exercise reduce their risk of dying by 50 percent, Boston researchers report.

Even those who walk for as little as an hour a week increase their chances of survival, but walking for more than five hours per week does not provide any additional benefit, according to the study published in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

It previously was shown that vigorous exercise can reduce the risk of developing breast cancer in the first place, but this is the first study to find it can be a valuable therapeutic tool as well.

It follows on a study published just last week that demonstrated that adopting a low-fat diet can also reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence. The studies show that a healthy lifestyle can play a major role in fighting the disease.

“This gives us an opportunity to tell women there is something they can do that is good for them and is without serious side effects,” said Debbie Saslow of the American Cancer Society. “A lot of new treatments don’t make a bigger difference than this, and some make even less.”

An estimated 211,240 women will develop breast cancer this year, says the American Cancer Society, and 40,410 will die from it. It is the second-leading cancer killer among women, trailing lung cancer. An estimated 2 million women now living have survived it.

The researchers studied 2,987 nurses in the Nurses’ Health Study who were diagnosed with breast cancer between 1984 and 1998. They were followed until they died or until June 2002, whichever came first.